ExCo News – April/May 2004

By Patrick Lambe

It has been a busy few months since our last newsletter! We have been busy on a number of fronts, including membership activities, member services and ExCo make-up.

Executive Committee
As we promised at our AGM in January, we have begun the renewal process for our committee, and now have a stronger representation from practising knowledge managers, and more clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Professors Suliman and Chaudhry, Kishore Jethmal, Calvin Chan and Lim Thou Tin have stepped down with our heartfelt thanks for their hard work over the past years. They will continue to be involved with iKMS in new ways. We coopted five new members, including three working knowledge managers. The roles and responsibilities of committee members have also been more clearly defined, with performance indicators! You can see the new line-up and role descriptions on our iKMS Committee webpage.

Special Interest Groups
Our long-promised new-style special interest groups have also been launched, with Raymond Cheung spearheading their growth as SIG Coordinator on ExCo. You can download the SIG Guidelines (in pdf) from our website. We hope you’ll use this opportunity to develop some more focused community of practice activity in areas that are relevant to you. We already have one call for a SIG on intellectual capital management from Christopher Yeung. Email Raymond Cheung if you want to start your own!

Events
We commenced our series of low-cost practice-focused KM seminars with two highly successful events in March (on taxonomies) and April (on communities of practice). We plan three or four more later in the year – ideas include knowledge audits, storytelling, mapping social networks, conducting after action reviews, and KM for law firms. Your feedback and suggestions are encouraged! We plan two evening talks (free for members) in May (case studies) and July (approaches and methods).

International Collaboration
I represented iKMS at the Australian KM Challenge Conference in March 2004. There I was able to discuss possible collaboration with Waltraut Ritter of HKKMS and delegates from Korea, India, Pakistan and Australia. One tangible outcome is that the iKMS Taxonomy Seminar will run in Hong Kong on 4th June, hosted by HKKMS. The Hong Kong Society is planning a KM Portals Seminar which we are also seeking to bring to Singapore. Finally, you can catch up with KM developments in Japan, UK and Thailand through the sharing forum for KM societies established by iKMS.

Membership Services
Our contract with Meeting Matters for our secretariat services expired end of April, and we have decided to split the way in which we manage membership services. Meeting Matters will remain our partner on the organization of the iCKM Conference, and we will be acquiring a new online membership management software so that ExCo members can have more direct management of membership services and communications. This will give us some of the things that you have asked for – private members’ area, member directory, and so on. Meanwhile, Straits Knowledge has kindly agreed to provide secretariat services for the remainder of 2004 at no charge to the Society. The official address of iKMS has changed to c/o Straits Knowledge 27 Teo Hong Road, Singapore 088334.

New Members
We welcome the following new members since the beginning of March: Chiam Ching Leen; Rosina Howe-Teo; Land Transport Authority (corporate); Siaw Ying Kwong; Lee Foon Yee; Michael Koh; Pan Yaming; National Library Board (corporate); Marinah Marzuki; Meenachi Sundaram Muthu Lakshmi; Ng Kin Yee; Karen Black. We look forward to your participation and sharing!

Patrick Lambe
President, iKMS